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Tatarkiewicz began his higher education at Warsaw University. When it was closed by the Russian Imperial authorities in 1905, he was forced to continue his education abroad in Marburg, where he studied from 1907 to 1910.[2]

As he describes in his Memoirs, it was a chance encounter with a male relative, whose height made him stand out above the crowd at a Kraków railroad station, upon the outbreak of World War I that led Tatarkiewicz to spend the war years in Warsaw.[3] There he began his career as a lecturer in philosophy, teaching at a girls' school on Mokotowska Street, across the street from where Józef Piłsudski was to reside during his first days after World War I.

During World War I, when the Polish University of Warsaw was opened under the sponsorship of the occupying Germans – who wanted to win Polish support for their war effort – Tatarkiewicz directed its philosophy department in 1915–19.

During World War II, risking his life, he conducted underground lectures in German-occupied Warsaw[5] (one of the auditors was Czesław Miłosz).[6] After the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising (August–October 1944) he again consciously risked his life when retrieving a manuscript from the gutter, where a German soldier had hurled it (this and other materials were later published as a book, in English translation titled Analysis of Happiness).[7]

Władysław Tatarkiewicz died the day after his 94th birthday. In his Memoirs, published shortly before, he recalled having been ousted from his University chair by a (politically connected) former student. Characteristically, he saw even that indignity as a blessing in disguise, as it gave him freedom from academic duties and the leisure to pursue research and writing.[8]

And in sum it is a good existence: that of a retired old professor. He still has something to do, but is under no compulsion. He only voluntarily imposes compulsions on himself. He has time: at any time of day, he can go for a walk in the park—as long as his legs will still carry him. Equally, or even more, important is this: he no longer has ambition, he has ceased to be a rival to others. He is no inconvenience to others, they have no need to fear him, they have no reason to envy him: in this situation—without opponents, rivals and enemies—life is considerably more tolerable.[9]

Tatarkiewicz later reflected that at all crucial junctures of his life he had failed to foresee events, many of them tragic, but that this had probably been for the better, since he could not have altered them anyway.[10]

Tatarkiewicz educated generations of Polish philosophers, estheticians and art historians, as well as a multitude of interested laymen.[12] He posthumously continues to do so through his History of Philosophy and numerous other works.

In his final years, Tatarkiewicz devoted considerable attention to securing translations of his major works. Of the works listed below, his History of Philosophy and Memoirs remain to be translated into English.

On Perfection (English translation by Christopher Kasparek serialized in Dialectics and Humanism: the Polish Philosophical Quarterly, vol. VI, no. 4 [autumn 1979] — vol. VIII, no. 2 [spring 1981]; Polish: O doskonałości, 1976; Kasparek's translation has subsequently also appeared in the book: Władysław Tatarkiewicz, On perfection, Warsaw University Press, Center of Universalism, 1992, pp. 9–51; the book is a collection of papers by and about the late Professor Tatarkiewicz).